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At their annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS unleashed a flurry of announcements about upcoming cloud services. Amazon outlined over two dozen new capabilities coming to the public cloud, including directly querying data in S3 object storage, building code as part of deployment pipelines, provisioning cheap virtual private servers, and moving data in bulk, ETL-style.

Secret management is a difficult problem in a distributed and scalable environment. Chef-vault is a Chef tool built on top of encrypted data bags that eliminates the need to share the decryption key with all users and nodes of an infrastructure.

Daniel Schauenberg described at QCon London how Etsy, renowned for its DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices, does 50 deploys/day. A fully automated deployment pipeline, thorough application monitoring and IRC-based collaboration are all important to achieve this rate of change while keeping risk to a minimum. Etsy has about 60 million monthly visits and 1.5 billion page views per month.

Meez is a new gem that will help get started with test-driven infrastructure for Chef cookbooks. It creates all the boilerplate necessary to assess a cookbook’s quality using tools such as Test Kitchen, Foodcritic, ChefSpec and others, allowing the user to focus on writing actual tests and infrastructure code.

Chef Sugar is an extension to Chef that offers DSL methods to make more readable recipes. Seth Vargo, Chef Sugar's author, recently wrote about his motivations for creating Chef Sugar, highlighting them with examples. InfoQ interviewed Seth to know more about his views on syntactic sugar and the benefits of a plug-in architecture in the context of Chef.

Rackspace, cloud computing platform provider and founder of OpenStack, is currently introducing its new DevOps Automation Service. They offer managed support for things like infrastructure and workflow automation, monitoring and log aggregation, and source control for infrastructure code.

Opscode has just announced Enterprise Chef with new capabilities for automating configuration of Microsoft Windows, networking and storage. Enterprise Chef will be the successor to Private Chef and Hosted Chef as Opscode's new offering to provide the capabilities for configuring entire infrastructures.

Amazon's free, one-day cloud community event took place in Berlin this month. Aimed at developers, technical and business leaders, the topics of the series increasingly focus on cost effectiveness, high availability, big data and security. The summit was complemented with presentations from successful local AWS adopters.

OpsCode is providing a new avenue for learning chef aimed at equipping new users with what they need to start building "Infrastructure as Code". The content leads users through a quickstart, common cases, screen casts, and troubleshooting.

Being nice to people and being explicit and transparent about how things are done are key ingredients for growing communities say both, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of PuppetLabs, and Adam Jacob, co-founder of Opscode and creator of Chef. They both claim that you need to be genuine in the way you interact with your communities.

Facebook rolled out Private Chef, Opscode's commercial infrastructure automation product, to manage its web-tier. To ensure that Chef meets Facebook's scalability requirements they helped design the latest version of Chef Server, which is a total re-write using Erlang.

Opscode released Chef 11 early this month with enhancements to its scalability to meet the demands of hyperscale web operations. Opscode rewrote the entire server core API in Erlang and at the same time kept it backward compatible. Opscode renamed the core server API "Erchef" to complement the rewrite in Erlang.

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